Books & Comfort

After a week of like the craziest crap with our internet, I’m pretty much all for a discussion post with it’s lack of graphics and photos.

Also, I did think about this topic quite a bit with my new found…isolation.

I love hanging around people, well, my friends, and though I can come off as antisocial to those who don’t know me, I’ve found myself pretty much alone a lot in the last few years.

I had a hard time making friends moving back to Scotland the second time, all my previous friends in a different city and area of Scotland. Not to mention now there’s this added isolation factor FOR ALL OF US and also, well, I’ve got rural isolation on top of pandemic isolation.

It makes me realize just how much comfort I draw from books to stave off the loneliness.

When the internet is down when time zones separate me from the people who make all the difference in my life, I depend almost solely on books to keep my moral afloat. It’s definitely been put to the test the last two years but it also gives me pause.

I have no idea where I would be now without the comfort of books, the characters are the friends filling in the gaps when my own are busy/far away/going through their own troubles. I think of these characters as the greatest comfort that literature can provide me and I find myself so freakin’ thankful for it.

Rather than losing myself to this obsolete feeling that tries to grab hold when I am alone, I turn toward the worlds that have been crafted to feel real to readers. When the winter storms rage outside, when politics feel like a lost cause with the villains in power, when there is no where else to go, I can still escape into the worlds that authors built for us and they become safehavens.

You can moor your ship and weather the storm and all other sorts of pretty metaphors and words, and best of all it works on my loneliness. Now, reading can’t cure all, there are somethings that by reading we can’t lose ourselves, and we’re all different on how we handle situations but I do like to think many of us do find some comfort or another in the pages of books.

I also find comfort in not just the reading of just books but fanficiton, bookish content/posts, and even creating worlds in my own writings. (Go me I wrote 1400k today so that’s me patting myself on the back)

Even if the comfort is heartbreaking…*coughs* Reaper of Souls *coughs*

I also found so many new friends through the love of books and well that’s pretty amazing too.

How about you all? Is there a time when books give you comfort? Any in particular? (If you saw my 5 comfort reads you know I’m a dark horse in that area lol) Or how about any bookish friends you’ve made?